Until the Last Beat
by DragonSapphire
Summary: Craig's hanging on a beat. Craig/Tweek/Clyde


Disclaimer: I do not own South Park or its characters, and make no profit from writing this story. South Park & Characters are property of Matt Stone & Trey Parker.

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**Until the Last Beat**

By DragonSapphire

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Craig moved through the empty hospital hallway as silently as a ghost, knowing, despite the lack of living bodies currently, he wasn't the only apparition to have stalked these white, glaring corridors. Maybe not the only one right now, considering how goddamn cold it was, the air conditioning set to freeze the raindrops caught in his dark eyelashes, despite the lack of rain.

Again...again he was here. Pacing these halls while room number 112 in the Intensive Care Unit was again occupied by the bodies of his lover and boyfriend. Craig felt like he should demand Motel 6 rates at the frequency in which they resided in that goddamn room.

He should be in there now. Watching over Clyde watching over their stupid, fucked up Tweekers, hooked to tubes and lines like a miniature water park had taken up residence in his veins. Overdosed this time...like Craig couldn't even pretend in his mind that Tweek had mistaken thirty-two Vicodin for a bag of Skittles, not with the way his spooked, hazel eyes had long-ago glazed over before his heart quit beating for the third time that year.

Craig's sneaker skidded over the gleaming tiled floor, imbedding the toe into the wall and resuming his pacing with little interruption after that brief stumble.

He buried himself in work, maintaining that stupid fucking coffee shop that likened himself to a poppy farmer, supplying the addict with his opium of choice, but he could no more take caffeine away from Tweek than the needles that had been accumulating on their sticky bathroom floor.

Besides, they needed the money. For their apartment, for Clyde's tuition and school books, for Tweek's increasing list of desperate habits. But Craig needed money less than he did for his bitches just to be safe, sound, and whole, which he was never going to get anyway, so might as well go for option number-fucking-two and leave Clyde to clean up the mess that was their life.

"Craig? What are you doing? How long have you been out here?" Clyde's brown head was messy and disheveled as it peeked around the heavy door of room 112, layers of their fingerprints smudged into its surface.

Craig turned on his heel for his last pace without answering, Clyde answering himself in his own mind and likely coming up with truer answers than any Craig could come up with. Clyde straightened and stepped into the hallway with a quick, furtive glance behind him, closing the door with a soft sigh on its hinges, doing the work for him.

_How is he?_

_He's..._

_Yeah. Yeah I know._

Their usual wordless exchange, more intimate and well-known than a simple greeting kiss. Clyde looked at his mouth hopefully, but Craig only jerked his head in a negative. Not now...not when...not when it'd only be half a kiss, needing the uncoordinated jumbled collision of three sets of laughing, cursing lips to not fall apart at the seams.

Clyde hugged him instead. Full-bodied, chest to hips to knees, locking in as Craig's lips brushed against his temple in apology for everything he's done wrong, everything he'd failed to do, in futile hope that God may have mercy on their souls. His own had been lost after Tweek's first suicide attempt when they were sixteen and just figuring things out, very nearly stopped before they'd even started, although Craig wasn't sure if they hadn't just moved backwards from there.

Clyde gently drew him into the room Craig could no longer enter through his own violation, no matter that it was his lover in there, Tweek's heart that was Clyde and Craig's on cold, mechanical display, measuring his will, maybe even his love for them with slow beeps on the monitor that Craig had watched flatline way too often.

Tweek looked like an angel on that stark white hospital bed. An angel that they'd captured, raped, and sucked all the vitality out of and left in stasis in display of the once-beautiful. The fallen. Craig could feel his face crumple and his breath hitch icily in his chest five steps into the room...five steps less than yesterday.

Craig felt himself reaching the point where he couldn't do this anymore, and it scared the shit out of him. He couldn't watch Tweek put himself in that bed again and again, deaf mute and blind to Clyde and Craig's pain, their attempts at support that were deflected by Tweek's violent repulsions and self-destructive patterns.

There was no doubt in Craig's mind that he'd helped put Tweek in that bed this time, his mouth and temper sabotaging Clyde's soft words and gentle coaxings when he turned verbal abuse on Tweek, nearly out of his mind with the effortless way Tweek had managed to tune them out.

There was only so much Craig could take when all he wanted to do was touch that pale skin, kiss the rapid pulse over Tweek's throat, and hold him in his arms until the hurt just bled away. The bleeding that had occurred, however, was when Tweek had jerked away and clipped Craig's nose with his side of his head, screaming like Craig had tried to murder him in his sleep.

Craig made himself sick almost wishing he had.

Clyde had contented himself with fleeting touches when Tweek was too out of it to notice, or holding his hand while he was asleep. They had each other, of course, his boyfriend the _only_ reason Craig hadn't blown his own brains out in the final move Tweek had yet to make.

Clyde was with Tweek day and night, ignoring his own exhaustion despite the dark circles under his eyes, the tightness drawn at the corners of his mouth, and the way Craig quietly counted his ribs and hipbones with his fingers when they fucked instead of grabbing at the little bit of lovehandles Clyde hadn't quite grown out of from their childhood until now.

Clyde had left him at his five steps in Tweek's hospital room with a sorrowful, broken look and returned to his place at Tweek's bedside, slipping his hand into the thin, clammy one that had gone cold without Clyde's constant external heat.

Craig hated Tweek. He hated him for putting that look in Clyde's eyes, hated him for making him scared to approach his own lover for fear of only getting a preview of what he'd see one day laying in an open casket. But still, Craig wasn't strong enough to quit loving him, even though the times they had lain in bed together, hands a sticky mess overlapping on Tweek's flat belly with Craig and Clyde locking their Tweekers in on both sides were more of a distant memory now.

Still, some fragment of hope remained in Craig's heart, somehow finding his way to the chair on the other side of the lowered hospital bed one more time, taking Tweek's other unresponsive hand and locking him in as he counted the fading heartbeats.

_~fin_


End file.
